On Rings, Tolkien, and Curses

A curious set of historical oddities:

Either we have a remarkable coincidence here – Senicianus is a rare name – or we have two halves of a fourth-century story written out on a pair relics from Roman Britain found a couple of hundred miles apart.

Silvanus had lost a ring that had been stolen or lent to Senicianus and Silvanus, in a fine fury, wrote out a curse tablet to bring down the wrath of Nodens (a nasty water-dog divinity) on the ring’s possessor. Senicianus meanwhile didn’t give a damn and got his name inscribed (badly) on the ring’s edge.

Beachcombing concedes that it is not Anna Karenina. But it is one of these rare moments when dark British antiquity becomes human:

‘The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there...’

This strange soap opera played out through two archaeological objects is surely reason enough to visit an obscure Tudor house – what a shame the original curse stone and the ring could not be exhibited together!

However, there is more. When Mortimer Wheeler was digging at Lydney in 1929 he got in touch with an obscure Oxford don to do some of the linguistic legwork on the name Nodens. (A god that incidentally survives in Welsh legend as Nudd). The name of this obscure don? None other than J. R. R. Tolkien. Anyone who ever thrilled over the Hobbit should now see where this is going.

Tolkien published an appendix to Wheeler’s work and it has been suggested that Wheeler told J.R.R. about a cursed ring and that a story began, already at that early date, to ferment in the scholar’s mind.

One ring to rule them all…